A method and implementing system is provided by which software is formatted to include a selected program together with installation instructions for the installation of the selected program. In an exemplary embodiment, the software is an archive containing the selected program and an installer program. In a specific example, a manifest file, which is contained within a JAR file includes a manifest tag which specifies a class to be executed for the installation process. In another exemplary embodiment, a different tag indicates to automatically run an executable "setup.exe" for the installation process. Functions of the installation process may include extracting contents of multiple JAR files, executing self-extracting executables, or setting environment variables such as CLASSPATH. Uninstall instructions may also be packaged in the JAR.